Friday, September 10, 2010

The Kids are Playing

Goodness, telling the Elevator Story juiced me out a bit – I’m a little dry today. I’m sorry. Does that happen to you? You just dry up. Sometimes I talk so much I have to go and lie down.

I know I’m tired when the music from the kids’ school across the road infiltrates my morning dreams rather than waking me up. This time I was sitting on the knee of a big old black man a bit like Kamahl (maybe because he was on television the other night), but he was way bigger and had huge big purple sausages for fingers which were wrapped around my tiny little white ones. He was lovely and I felt very safe sitting on his knee, as though I was surrounded by a fortress. I think he may have been Santa because I was telling him all the things I wanted. And the things were highly inappropriate, naughty, violent things (maybe because we watched Kickass last night) and the Kamahl Santa just kept saying Yes Yes My Dear and his deep deep voice resonated against my back all warm. A kid who looked a bit like Mike Teevee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory brought over a heavy hessian sack full of weird-shaped stuff and sharp knives and spikes and blades were coming through the sides. It was all I ever wanted. I thanked him and the Kamahl Santa gave me a hug and I kissed his cheek and picked up the sack and walked away through the Shopping Centre past the donut stand where mum would buy me donut holes when I was good. Did you find the concept of donut holes mind-blowing? I think I still do. The blades kept sticking into my sides, so I dropped the bag to the ground and dragged it, and the knives tore huge gaping holes in the linoleum floor that revealed big black caverns like Mordor. I looked around and everyone in the Shopping Centre had stopped and was staring at me and the terrible mess I’d made. I’d ruined the shopping centre. But I needed the bag. So I kept dragging it out, knowing that the people were behind me and coming to get me like in Thriller. But Kamahl started singing and I could hear his voice ringing through the shopping centre and out into the carpark so I knew I would be ok. Also the Mordor sized gap stood between me and them. I kept walking, dragging, and the singing made me feel warm inside.

I woke up to the last luscious strains of a Louis Armstrong song, trumpets soaring above the neighbourhood. Ah, Louis. Ah Kamahl. I wondered about dream filters, the fat colander that sifts the outside world through to your dreams, turning things like Louis Armstrong into Kamahl and schoolbells into the electric chair and the need to go to the bathroom into endless treks through the jungle. I wonder what other people’s filter turned their Louis into. But then, nobody in the neighbourhood would still be sleeping at 8:55am. Nobody’s that naughty.

“I must go over and tell that principal she has excellent taste,” I mumble to The Love (who is not there, he got up hours ago) before rolling over and snoozily wrapping the warm feeling of Kamahl and Louis around myself in my bedclothes. But the kids are playing so I don’t last long and get up. Because there’s nothing worse than that feeling of being in bed when the kids are outside playing. Is there?